KIANA HONARMAND

July — September 2022

Kiana Honarmand is an artist born and raised in Iran. Her work addresses issues related to her cultural identity, violation of women's rights in Iran, censorship, surveillance, and the Western perception of the Middle East. Derived from her interest in different materials and processes, Kiana’s interdisciplinary practice features the use of digital fabrication tools as well as traditional methods of craft. In 2012, Kiana moved to the United States to pursue and complete her Master of Fine Arts degree. She currently lives and works in the Bay Area.

GREGORY CLIMER

April — June 2022

Gregory Climer’s work explores queer identity and focuses on how traditional crafts can be transformed by new technologies in a way that maintains the warmth and value of the handmade.

Climer is the chair of the fashion program at California College of the Arts. He received his MFA in Design + Technology from Parsons School of Design. His textile work has been shown in the Museum of Art and Design (NYC), The Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art (NYC), The DeYoung Museum (San Francisco, CA), The Mint Museum of Art (Charlotte, NC), Muskegon Museum of Art (Muskegon, MI), and many galleries. He currently lives in San Francisco.

OLIVIA RONAN

JANUARY — MARCH 2022

Olivia Ronan is an interdisciplinary visual artist and creative mender. She completed her BFA at University of California, Santa Cruz and currently teaches fiber arts and hand sewn repair in Aptos, California. Her practice is about getting into the weeds of entwined existence. Through sculpture and performance, she considers ideas of ephemerality, alteration, and ecology; the liminality of events, objects, and entities, the unfolding narrative that lies behind their impact, and our collective role in that life cycle. She engages forms that embody emotional and mental change through line, weight, and texture and weaves poetic juxtapositions between elements defined as nostalgic versus discarded, or precious versus overlooked. In cohesion with these reflections, she explores various forms of co-making and creative inquiry with plants. She is particularly interested in the ways time, locality, and context shape our connections to plants and she likes to re-envision relationships to plants who have become formally estranged or disregarded by those around them.

REBECCA HERMAN & MARK SHOFFNER

OCTOBER — DECEMBER 2021

Rebecca Herman and Mark Shoffner have been artistic collaborators since 1999, creating sculptures and installation incorporating textiles, wood, bamboo, paper, and reclaimed materials. Their recent work draws on art and architecture from different cultures to create new sites of interaction and refuge in contemporary society. They have created textile-based sculptures for numerous exhibitions, including several outdoor installations at Lacawac Sanctuary, in Lake Ariel, PA. They have also developed new interactive sculptures as artists-in-residence at Sapporo Tenjinyama Art Studio, Japan; Contemporary Art Center, Woodside, NY; Catskill Center for Conservation and Development, Platte Clove, NY; and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York.

CORINNE OKADA TAKARA

June — September 2021 DIGITAL ARTIST IN RESIDENCE

Corinne Takara is a Bay Area artist/arts educator who creates technology integrated art projects. Her public collaborative work explores the use of modern-day products to preserve cultural heritage and memory, and honors the colliding and merging stories that arise in rapidly shifting communities.

The BioQuilts Project is a series of workshops and online interactions in which residents from San Jose's Japantown, Little Saigon, Mayfair, and South of First Area neighborhoods can experiment alongside Corinne to grow new biomaterials sourced from local and cultural ingredients. Ultimately, the BioQuilts Project hopes to make accessible education on sustainability, science, and bioengineering innovation.

ABBY HOLMES

March — June 2021 DIGITAL ARTIST IN RESIDENCE

Abby Holmes is an artist and writer based in Los Gatos, California who often incorporates text in her artwork. Her medium of choice is fiber. She paints and writes on it, cross stitches it, uses it in collages, and sews, weaves and quilts it! She creates work that is informed by her role as a wife and mother. She also produces art to deal with the ups and downs of bipolar disorder. If she’s not creating art, you can find her spending time with family and friends, or reading or walking.

Abby has a B.A. from Ohio Wesleyan University and her studio space is currently a cubicle at the Office Depot Workonomy Hub in Los Gatos.

CAROLINA CUEVAS

January — March 2021 DIGITAL ARTIST IN RESIDENCE

Carolina Cuevas is a Cuban-American artist currently based in the Bay Area. Her work carries a sense of vulnerability and displacement which is borne of the conflicting ideals of family, home, and spirituality between her mixed American and Cuban upbringing. Through her work, she conveys nationality while bridging the identities of these two seemingly disparate worlds. 

Cuevas has a BFA in Sculpture from the Kansas City Art Institute. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Miami Dade College, The Locust Project Gallery in Miami, International Ceramics Studio in Kecskemét, Hungary, and in the Kansas City Art Institute. As well as virtual shows such as The In Art Gallery. She is the recipient of several awards including the McKeown Grant, Rita and Irwin Scholarship Award, and the Ox-Bow Workshop Recipient. She has also been published in the Miamibiance Magazine and her work has been on the promotional posters for the Kansas City Art Institute’s End of Semester shows.

CHRISTINE MEURIS

OCTOBER — DECEMBER 2020 DIGITAL ARTIST IN RESIDENCE

Christine Meuris is an artist living and working in Berkeley California.  She holds a B.A. in Environmental Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

She has participated in juried shows throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and the country and has been invited to participate in groups shows at the Berkeley Art Center, Berkeley Civic Center, The Mosser Hotel, Berkeley Wealth Management and the Roll Up Gallery.  She has also had solo shows at Farley’s Café,  Hello Stitch Quilting and Sewing Studio, and The Totally Rad Gallery.   

She is an artist member of Mercury20 Gallery in Oakland, California and will have her first a solo show there later this year.

MUNG LAR LAM

January — October 2020 Artist in Residence

Mung Lar Lam uses the art of performance and textiles to examine gender roles and the perception of ‘women’s work’ in public spaces. Exploring themes of social and sexual politics, her work combines the practices of traditional dressmaking techniques with the formalism of drawing, painting and sculpture. Inventing a lexicon of terms such as Ironings, Stitchings, Needlemarkings and Chalkings to call her works, she strives to push the limitations of current art nomenclature to more accurately serve post-disciplinary practices in contemporary art; while highlighting the marginalization of perceived feminine mediums, crafts and skills.

Mung Lar received a BA in Textile Art from San Francisco State University, an MFA in Textiles from California College of the Arts, SF and an MPhil in Economic and Social History as a member of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure at the University of Cambridge, UK.

TRICIA ROYAL

OCTOBER — DECEMBER 2019 Artist in Residence

Tricia Royal is a printmaker, surface designer, and fiber artist. She makes hand-printed paper patchwork quilt collages and contemporary studio quilts that feature recycled materials, and her hand-printed and painted papers and textiles. Conceptually, Tricia’s work explores the liminal space between past and present, chaos and control, trash and treasure, and matters of taste, as well as the relative value of textiles in a global, throwaway economy, and the public perception of the quilt as art.

AMBER IMRIE

July — September 2019 Artist in Residence

Amber’s work explores the culture and politics around rural living, with a special focus on how this forms our relationship with nature and how we view its preservation and worth. Through auto-ethnographic research into her own upbringing, photography of her homeland, and those close to her, she positions the personal as political.

ALEX HERNANDEZ

APRIL — JUNE 2019 Artist in Residence

Alexander Hernandez is a San Francisco based artist who explores gender, immigration, and cultural assimilation. As a self-identified Queer artist coming from an immigrant background, Hernandez references those experiences through his work using needlework, DIY craft, and traditional techniques. Hernandez received his MFA in Studio Practice from the California College of the Arts and a BFA in Painting and Drawing from Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design.

LISA SOLOMON

January — March 2019 Artist in Residence

Profoundly interested in the idea of hybridization (sparked from her Hapa heritage – she is ½ Japanese and ½ Caucasian), Solomon’s mixed media works revolve thematically around domesticity, craft, and masculinity/femininity, and often the pursuit of art as science/research. She is frankly obsessed with color/color theory and is drawn to found objects tending to alter them conceptually so that their meanings and original uses or intents are re-purposed. She often fuses “wrong” things together – re contextualizing their original purposes, and incorporating materials that inherently question and skirt the line between ART and CRAFT.

MARGARET TIMBRELL

Fall 2018 Artist in Residence

Margaret Timbrell uses humor in her embroidery works to examine the way language is used today through technology. The San Francisco based artist adapts phone texts that have been altered incorrectly through the use of auto correct. Her work poses questions regarding the quality of language and how we communicate/miscommunicate with one another.

ALISE ANDERSON

Summer 2018 Artist in Residence

Alise Anderson was born in Houston, Texas. From 2007 to 2009 she studied Modern Dance Performance and Choreography at Utah Valley University. Later receiving a certificate in Directing and Producing at Berkeley Digital Film Institute. With her work, there is a subtle humor in everything she creates, even if it stems from a darker memory, story or feeling. She uses traditional fiber art practices, often painstaking and time-consuming, labors of love to tell these stories, adding another layer to the work's interplay between things tender (soft) and severe. Her work has been featured in KnitWit Magazine and Kole Magazine. Anderson currently lives and works in Oakland.

LIZ HARVEY

Spring 2018 ARTIST IN RESIDENCE

Liz Harvey is an interdisciplinary artist whose sculpture and performances have been shown in galleries, museums, and alternative spaces, including a national park, a riverbed, and an arroyo. Harvey works in sculpture and performance, drawing on craft processes to explore loss, history, and imagined futures. For her performance projects, she collaborates with musicians, sound artists, dancers and scientists. 

Harvey's work looks back and forward – she makes elegies and predictions. By engaging with “women’s handiwork”, her current work explores plant-human relationships. Most recently her work has focused on time - through considering the increased rate of plant extinctions and the ongoing decline of the planet’s biodiversity. Harvey’s work “actively engages the rich and multifarious history of feminist art practice, while also attesting to a highly personal and singular vision,” according to Los Angeles critic, artist and poet Eve Wood. 

Click here to see Liz Harvey's multiyear durational performance project, the lost ones.

LAURIE SHAPIRO

Spring 2017 Artist in Residence

Laurie Shapiro’s large-scale, tapestry-like, mixed-media paintings are sometimes viewed from the wall and sometimes walked inside of.  Fascinated by color and process, Shapiro initially builds up her paintings by hand-sewing painted segments and drawn screen prints on raw muslin, followed by layers of over-painting.  From afar, her pieces look like paintings, but when viewed more closely, one can see the hand-stitching of her screen printed drawings.  A few artists she admires are Roy De Forest, Gustav Klimt, and Kerry James Marshall.

CRISTINA VELAZQUEZ

Winter 2017 Artist in Residence

Cristina Velázquez is an interdisciplinary visual artist who reuses and transforms everyday obsolete objects into works of art, addressing feminist and ecological issues through the term Ecofeminism. Velázquez earned a Bachelors of Fine Art with a concentration in painting from San Jose State University in 2001, and a Masters of Arts and Masters of Fine Arts, Dual Degree from San Francisco Art Institute in 2017.

AMY AHLSTROM

Fall 2016 Artist in Residence

Amy Ahlstrom is an urban quilter creating modern pop art. Inspired by the street art, signage, and graffiti in city neighborhoods, Amy takes digital photos of found images, sampling and remixing them into urban quilts. Using hundreds of digital photographs, she designs collages by computer, makes paper patterns, and hand-cuts and sews quilts. The resulting quilts, made of silk and cotton and stretched onto frames, are tactile visual postcards of urban environments. They re-imagine the urban landscape and re-invent quilting as a pop art medium.